


State of Mind

by lovetincture



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:00:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25501015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/pseuds/lovetincture
Summary: It's legal in the state of Ohio.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Comments: 54
Kudos: 304





	State of Mind

**Author's Note:**

> There's so much _fuss_ about Incest Being Problematic on Twitter. God forbid our favorite credit card scamming, pool hustling monster slayers get up to anything weird between the sheets. I thought I'd do my part to eliminate at least one vector of Problematic, though. Remember, friends—it's legal in Ohio.

The rain comes down hard, pelting the window in thick sheets. It feels like they’re underwater. Like they’re in a fish tank behind the sheet glass of another nameless, faceless laundromat. Sam closes his eyes and drifts—not toward sleep; he’s got too much sense to fall asleep out in the open—but toward a certain comfortable lack of awareness. Forgetting who and where he is, if only for a little while, is practically a luxury.

The chug of the machines and the dim rattle of dryers is a lullaby, the air perfumed with dryer sheets. The smell of frying meat wafts in from outside, persistent despite the rain.

“Man, I would kill for some tacos,” Dean says over the tinny music playing from the radio.

Sam makes a vague sound of assent.

The dryer clicks off, and everything inside comes to a tumbling standstill. Sam looks over at Dean sitting in the slatted plastic chair opposite, but Dean only grunts and nudges him with a foot.

Sam sits up with a groan, pushing himself out of creaking plastic to check on their clothes— _their_ clothes, because they’d figured out several states back that it makes no sense to do two separate loads. Quarters are a hot commodity. Still damp. He fishes a few more coins out of his pocket and loads them up for twenty-one more minutes.

He doesn’t sit right away. He stays standing and looks out the window, tapping his fingers along the Formica counter as he watches it come down. _Fish tank,_ he thinks. He thinks _glass bottom boat._

* * *

Sam hasn’t always been in love with his brother. He wasn’t pining for Dean when they were both in school, skinned knees and threadbare hand-me-downs and bowls of soggy cereal shared on the couch, Sam stealing Dean’s and slurping up the sugary-sweet milk while Dean made a face. That was all normal stuff. Kid stuff. There was a time when they were just brothers.

It’s hard to tell when no became yes, though, because it wasn’t like flicking a switch. The way he feels about Dean isn’t binary, isn’t a yes or no, pervert or brother, normal or fucked up. He thinks about frogs submerged in a pot of cold water. Thinks about the gradually rising heat—the way they don’t know there’s trouble until their skin starts to fry.

Dean slouches in the driver’s seat, hand tapping out a Zeppelin song on the steering wheel, eyes fixed on the horizon. Sam looks at him, and yeah—he thinks of that.

They drive under a sky blue arch under a bright blue sky. A sign bolted to the bridge pronounces “Ohio welcomes you!”

Sam slinks down into his seat and tries to get a few more hours of shut-eye.

* * *

There are a few things he knows for sure about Ohio—it’s flat and boring and covered in corn, they’re hunting something that’s chowing down on students around the Miami University inexplicably located in Oxford, Ohio—and certain things are legal here.

It’s the second thing that has him hopping the fence of a university-run game reserve hot on the heels of his brother, creeping through the brush with gun in hand and every sense on high alert. It’s the last thing that has him sweating through his shirt, even long after the hunt is ended and the werewolf is dead. There’s no danger here—just another stale smoke motel, another tacky carpet, ancient bedspread place to rest his head—but try telling his body that.

Adrenaline pumps through his veins, the sickest kind of high. He’s dry-mouthed and clammy hands. He grips the sides of his own legs too tight, white-knuckled and full of so much tension that even Dean can feel it from across the room.

He looks up from the table where he’s stripping and cleaning his gun. “Doing alright there, Sasquatch?”

Sam doesn’t say anything, although he should. He should scoff, laugh, give as good as he gets, tell Dean to fuck off then go peel himself out of his clothes and into the shower. Instead, he just sits there, zoned out and a little frozen.

It’s out of form enough that Dean sets down the body of his Colt with a click and pushes his chair out from the table.

“Did you get bit or something?” he’s murmuring, mostly to himself. He’s crossing the room in long strides and checking Sam over, hands proprietary and familiar, pushing down the shirt sleeves to check Sam's arms, rucking up a hem to look for gouges along Sam’s back. His cold, callused palm over Sam’s back feels like a revelation—the way he smooths it down, reassuring himself that Sam’s skin is unmarked, it shouldn’t feel that good.

Sam isn’t ready for it. He’s unprepared, hasn’t had a chance to steel himself against the sensation, and maybe that’s why he whimpers the way he does. It’s a small sound, tiny and cut off almost as soon as it starts.

But he heard it. He hopes against hope that Dean didn’t hear it.

He freezes, the adrenaline pounding in his ears. His heart is going about a million times per minute, and surely Dean can feel it through his skin. Dean’s hand freezes across his spine.

“Sam?” he asks, not accusatory or hopeful. Nothing but an honest to god question, like he might ask Sam about any other inexplicable, weird thing that he’s ever done.

“I—” His voice catches in his throat. He turns around, dislodging Dean’s hand. It falls to the bedspread, and Sam looks at it, the bitten-down ridges of nail, the callus on the side of his index finger. He feels a disproportionate sense of loss. “You.”

He drags his eyes up to Dean’s face with the last bit of strength in his body. Sam’s never been a coward—he’d made his peace with his statistically likely early grave at a young age, just like Dean had. You could call him a lot of true things, but a coward’s never been one of them. He still doesn’t have half the courage required for a thing like this.

But then there’s this, right? There’s the reason Sam feels the way he feels, and it’s because they are the way they are. It’s curse and cure all in one, malady and medicine. Dean reads the lines on his face, the shape of his eyes, the slant of his mouth. His eyes widen fractionally, and he knows, and then it’s over. Like ripping a bandaid off.

Sam waits for the killing blow, to be shunned or saved, or whatever it is comes next.

“Oh,” Dean says. “You. I?"

Sam can’t remember if he answers. Anything he did or didn’t do, did or didn’t say, is blotted out by what comes next—Dean hemming him in, scooting him all the way back against the wall because Sam will burn up if he doesn’t get away. Spontaneous combustion, like an immutable new law of the universe.

“It’s legal, you know,” Sam says; craziest thing he’s ever said.

“What?” Dean’s wearing this look on his face—this one that says he’s absolutely not following.

“This. It’s.” A wild laugh burbles its way up from his throat, high and hysterical. _“Incest.”_ Dean winces at the word. “It’s legal in the state of Ohio.”

Dean blows out a sharp breath. His hands flex on either side of Sam’s head, and Sam thinks this is it—this is the moment where Dean steps back, when he leaves, when he tells Sam this is a crazy idea, that it’s wrong, that they’re not doing this.

Dean doesn’t do any of those things. He inhales sharp through his nose, dragging his eyes along Sam’s face, attention so focused—so _intimate—_ that Sam can feel his cheeks coloring.

“Now why would you know a thing like that?” Dean asks, voice low and coated in sin. He looks at Sam’s lips when he talks, and Sam—he just looks at Dean.

Sam licks his lips to wet them. It’s a nervous habit, one he can he can’t quite shake, try though he might, and Dean’s eyes follow the movement like a snake. “I, uh, might’ve done a little. Research.”

“Uh-huh.”

He closes the last little gap between them, the last little scrap of air, and all Sam can think in the moment before his brother’s lips touch his is _oh._ In retrospect, this should have been more obvious.

Their want is a clawed, vicious thing that gives no quarter. Touching bare flesh is like cracking a seal; now they can’t get enough, hands scrabbling for purchase on a hip, on a thigh. On a scrap of bared abdomen, pushing and clawing and shoving cloth up out of the way. Seams strain and something rips before they can get it all off. Their bodies hit the door, the wall. The bed with satisfying force. Sam climbs him like a tree, and Dean lets him, lets him.

He thought it might be hard, but it’s so easy. Easy, at least, while their skins are still touching. Hard settles in later, once the cooling sweat on their bodies begins to mimic the prickle of fear. _What have I done_ worms its way into him like a parasite chewing through the dense muscle of his heart.

“It’s legal here,” Sam says to the dark, as if legality were the issue—as if all their problems could start and stop at the end of a gavel, neatly wrapped up like the PSA at the end of an after-school special. Incest, kids. Don’t try this at home.

He clings tight to the idea, thin as it is, a scrap of faith to keep away the ever-gathering dark.

“Yeah,” Dean says after a while. “Sure, Sammy.”

**Author's Note:**

> Come tell me how much you enjoyed this good, clean, legal fun on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/lovetincture).


End file.
